From A to Z
by schnook
Summary: Koibuchi University. The quiet, complacent, dowdy Amamizukan dorm is shaken to the core when a male student offers to model for the dorm head, Mrs. Chieko, on her newest artistic endeavour. For all intents and purposes, """ has hit the fan. AU. Tsukimi/Kuranosuke.
1. Chapter 1

**Title: From A to Z**

**Summary: Koibuchi University. The quiet, complacent, dowdy Amamizukan dorm is shaken to the core when a male student offers to model for the dorm head, Mrs. Chieko, on her newest artistic endeavour. For all intents and purposes, """ has hit the fan. AU. Tsukimi/Kuranosuke.**

**A/N: Short (**_**real**_** short) story, just to flush out all my **_**squees!**_

**Show: Princess Jellyfish**

**Pairing: Tsukimi/Kuranosuke**

**-x-x-x-**

There was a ninja scampering just above her head.

Evidence: The noises emanating from the ceiling mere centimetres from her forehead went far and beyond the scope of normalcy. She had heard the girls in her dorm yawn or scrape or giggle or mutter or even dance around their rooms during the night, but this was practically surreal.

There was a large scrape, as if a chair had been thrown back, a splash, two wall-clock ticks and a tremendous _whoop!_ The ceremony ended somewhat unceremoniously with three gentle coughs, one not-so-gentle curse, and what could have been a belch. Then an apocalyptic crash.

Tsukimi blinked tiredly.

It had been fine before Monday night, but for the following week the room above her own had been orchestrating the return of 1980s synthetic keyboard sound effects. Something else scraped from above her, making her start, and then a – _oh god, was that a laser beam?_ At this rate, her roommate would wake up, and then-

"_Tsukimi_," an eerie voice floated by her shoulder. She started for the second time in the space of a minute, only to find a single hand drift up from the bunk beneath her and grope at air.

"_Are you awake?_" The voice (presumably attached to the hand) persisted. "_I can't find you_." The hand groped around some more, frighteningly bony in the semi-darkness.

The fact that the hand _was_ groping made her shift further away. She pushed her pillow closer to the offending appendage, just in case.

"What is that?" Tsukimi asked.

"_What_?" The voice attached to the hand enquired.

"Those noises. Do you think they're hurt? Maybe I should go up and help."

The hand made a peace sign, and her roommate, Mayaya, waved away her concern. "There are always casualties in battle."

"They're doing _battle_?"

"Love _is_ a battle."

"Mayaya?"

The hand paused in its enthusiastic gesticulating. "_Hmm_?"

"This is an _all-girls_ dorm?"

-x-x-x-

"That's mother for you. She sits up all through the night, drawing boys making moves on each other and doing a hell of a lot of _almost_-kissing. Then they take each other's pants off and perform sexual manifestations of their affection for one another."

Chieko possessed the tact of a charging bull, but somehow this delivery didn't make a single one of the virgins squirm. If anything, they were somewhat removed. Some even curious, on what was hopefully a scientific level.

"Oh, I see."

"But _how_?"

"Understandable."

"Noisy," Tsukimi added, more factual than accusing, then after a brief pause held her hands up and quietly admitted, "not that I really mind."

In all truth, it made the dorm seem a little bit cosier at night. Amamizukan, being the oldest dorm on campus was something of an artefact. It was a charming old place, with gleaming tiles and a winding staircase, but it had the tendency to creek and moan on windy nights, sending all the occupants burrowing further under the covers. It had felt like years since she was in a full house, and constantly hearing someone close by made her ridiculously happy.

"Only a woman understands these things," Chieko nodded wisely, without actually pointing out what they all should understand. No one else seemed to understand, either. Furthermore, none particularly felt like _women_.

Exhibit B, for example.

Now, Mayaya had her own charms, to be sure. They were small and circular and quietly gleaming and locked in a small safe box, then padlocked, duct-taped, put inside another box, locked again, duct-taped again, sealed with putty, dried into a block of concrete, stowed away in a shipping container with the only key swallowed by a Blue Whale swimming idly somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. But they _existed_, and by laws of existentialism, it was not their recognition but their _existence_ that counted.

Unfortunately for Mayaya, though, society lived not by laws of existentialism, but by Face Value.

And simply put, Mayaya had _no_ Face Value.

And that's why at the supermarket, the girl behind the counter with highlighted hair, painted lips and doleful eyes called her _Madame_. And Mayaya had been her junior in high school.

Again, consider Exhibit C.

Exhibit C showed signs of premature aging, an itchy attitude, and outbursts of pent-up aggression. Cheiko wasn't even a student at Koibuchi University, but instead, the hired nurse. And here she was, sitting under a wimpy sapling by the toilet blocks with three sourly, dowdy, cloudy students who wouldn't know Spring Essentials if they were hit in the face with a pair of pastel-yellow flats.

"I need to get back to work," she sighed, eyeing her wristwatch. She snapped up like a toy soldier retracts; back straight, a determined glint to her eyes. She glanced down at the wayward group of young women she somehow was drawn to. "Stretch before you jump around," she instructed Mayama (who had somehow convinced the board to allow _strenuous role-play_ to not only be a subject, but also one-fifth of her credit for the semester). "Don't coop yourself up in your room all weekend," she eyed Tsukimi paternally, who had more experiencing in _cooping_ than the average non-free-range chicken. Before departing, she eyed Jiji, and bit out, "_Calcium_."

Which brings us to exhibit D.

_Wallflower_ used to be an apt description for someone who was content, yet bland, non-essential and overall unattractive in all ways, without being noticeably unattractive. That is, before movies and media took the traditional _wallflower_ and cast her as people like Anne Hathaway, Logan Lerman, and Lidsay Lohan.

The trouble is this; Jiji never had the natural beauty of Anne, the appeal of Logan, or the brimming confidence of Lindsay. She does, however, have the brown, sagging cardigan of her Aunt, the hairstyle of her Mother, and the watery responses of her ageing Grandmother. As a side note, she also meets with her grandmother every Tuesday morning at the front steps of McDonalds (her grandmother gets a coffee for free on her pension card, and then harasses the fifteen-year-old staff to give her another, because the aforementioned coffee was too sweet, too hot, too cold, too bitter, or all of the above at once). The two then drink their free coffee and perve on the older men waiting in line for their decaf latte.

"He could have been Richard Gere's father," Jiji surmises, a small, shy smile emerging.

"What'd he order?" Banba, who had overheard the conversation as she was on her way to the ladies room, made herself comfortable on a fresher patch of grass and played with the zipper on her _Thomas the Tank Engine_ pencil case.

"Vienna."

Sympathetic sounds were offered, like tokens of pity. No one dared ask who this _Richman Gear_ actually was.

"I was on a train to Vienna once," Banba offered.

"You've been overseas?" Tsukimi asked, surprised. She turned her mini chip packet inside-out, fingering the salt caught in the edges.

A great mass of hair shook, catching at some of the lower branches of the sapling. "It was on channel three. I lived the experience, though."

"Sounds exciting," offered a new voice.

Exhibit Unnamed, Unidentified, but most definitely male. Temporarily called Exhibit Z, for fear of placing him too close to the other lettered exhibits.

He was tall, lithe, confident, and seemed to be applying a stick made of some kind of miracle moisturising substance to his lips. He grinned roguishly down at the small group of non-women, who, in return, awarded him with their best impression of the Terracotta Army, China.

"I'm looking for Chieko." He said this served with a small, complimentary smile, free of charge.

Silence.

"It's about a job," he offered helpfully.

_Stony _silence.

"She's sometimes with you guys, right?"

_Steel abrasive_ silence.

"You know what? I'll check her office."

They watched, dumfounded, as a cheerful blonde boy in pants that were criminally tight bounded away, in search of their dear, unfortunate, about-to-get-the-shock-of-her-life friend Chieko. Just before he rounded the corner of the toilet block, he paused, turned, and waved at them with all the might his skinny arms could deliver.

"_Who_…?" Mayaya managed, barely. Her eyes seemed slightly out-of-focus.

A knowing glint had overcome Banaba, not unlike her uncanny knack for scanning people and inanimate objects for information. "I know that…," she struggled, trying to spit out a word as if it should never have been in her mouth, "…_guy_."

Jiji leaned back, catching a fleeting glimpse of the disappearing figure. "It's heading toward Amamizukan."

"_It_ would be," Banaba nodded sagely, sending an entrapped leaf soaring back towards the heavens. "It's working there. Or, will be."

"Doing what?" Jiji ventured, curious despite herself.

"Chieko's mum, our dorm head? The one with the late-night boy-loving drawing sessions?"

"What about it?"

"She's hired a new model."

There was a _pop!_ sound as Exhibit A, Tsukimi Kurashita, turned to stone.

**-x-x-x-**

**A/N: Continues tomorrow ;)**

**A/A/N: I get weirded out by my own writing when I try and AU a show I'm still relatively new to. But I had to. The love. It burns.**

**Review, Fav, Subscribe and Stalk me. I'm begging you. In a non-prostitutional way. I swear. Nothing weird. WINKS.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Title: From A to Z**

**Part 2**

**-x-x-x-**

Chieko crossed the threshold smoothly, stopping just short of bumping into the young man's chest.

"Just so you know, the last time a man stepped past these doors was in 1964; walked in a happily married man, walked back out circumcised."

"Um," he floundered.

"Don't even think of defiling this place."

This seemed to rouse him somewhat. "Look, I don't know what kind of _club_," he emphasised this term by bending two sets of fingers; a doubtful quotation, "you've got going on here, but let's just agree to stay out of each other's way. I won't pee in the carpets, if that's what you're thinking."

Chieko rounded on him, pulling her kimono up over her belly as if she were some kind of street fighter preparing for a brawl. "This isn't just some _club_," she mimicked his actions, little fingers jiggling up and down. "My girls are precious, and we don't need you coming in here and making a fuss."

He pinched his nose in exasperation. "Look, woman. It's an open _dorm_. I'm _meant_ to be here. Just show me where to – oh _god_," he flinched, as a new, slightly disturbing thought crashed into him with the force of a charging bull, "you're not all," he fought a grimace, "_watching_, are you?"

It was the first time he had heard the notorious creepy school nurse laugh outright – and it was in his face. He was pretty sure she had spat, too.

"_No_," she snorted, her head literally bucking up from the force of her glee. "Well, except my mother, obviously. And Tsukimi."

"Tsukimi?" He echoed.

"Hmm," Chieko bobbed her head up and down, "she _is_ the only one here with an arts degree. She'll just be doing some reference sketches for my mother, that's all. Like an assistant."

"Like a pain."

"_Mr Kuranosuke_," she warned.

But a thought had already seized him, and he turned back to her as he looped up the stairs, heading for the top floor. "It's not some kind of _virgin club_, is it?" The finger bending had returned with a vengeance. He willed himself – rather magnanimously – not to pale.

"Mr Kuranosuke," she smiled up at him sweetly, "You are aware, aren't you, that as the nurse of Koibuchi University, I am technically considered a teacher, right? And therefore, I am entitled to a teacher's privileges, _right_?" That eerie calm had descended over her, the kind that came before a storm. He'd seen that sign before.

"Where's this going?" He hedged.

"_Detention_," she smugly retorted, inverting the word in finger quotations.

-x-x-x-

Tsukimi wasn't exactly what you would dub a world-weary person, or even cluey for that matter. Even as a child her mother used to sigh, rap her on the head, and tell her to stop following everybody around. _Look sharp_, she'd say. _Follow through_. Sometimes, in her less than stellar moments as a child, she'd take this advice literally – being the embarrassingly dim sort she had been – and would earn a bombshell of a lecture.

It wasn't really like her parents thought she'd grow up to be any kind of walking goof; at least they had more faith than _that_. But sometimes she would recall those crisp reprimands (_look them straight in the eye_) and clear direction (_stand your ground_) and wonder if she hadn't wandered off a path that, in time, could have trained her to be someone just a little different than the girl she was now.

Sometimes, she'd feel as though she was missing someone she never really got the chance to know. But then it would pass, and life resumed.

In any case, she certainly felt stupid now.

"Just thirty minutes. Keep breathing; spend twenty minutes staring at your sketch pad, five minutes hiding in the toilet, and the other five under the table. It'll fly."

Mayaya, the obnoxious traitor, had even drawn a feasible battle plan (complete with the building's layout, enemy location, and chances of survival) onto the back of Tsukimi's second year Fashion since the Dawn of the Twentieth Century essay. Which was fine, actually. Since she was, you know, _failing_ it, apparently both inside and outside the class.

As it happened, the only person who seemed to understand whatever ancient dialect the lecturer of the class droned on and on in was Kuranosuke (who rocked up to class forty minutes late in clothes Tsukimi was confident could have been constructed out of kitchen foil, and for much less cash than he probably forked out for his twice-a-week fashion shows).

And now the King of Aluminium Foil was supposedly going to be artistically worshipped by the Queen of Dowdy Hand-Me-Downs and Half-Assed Essays, aided by her trusty companions, Sir Coal of Char and the lovely Lady A3 Pad.

_Nice._

"It's because you're the sketcher," Jiji had explained, ruffling through her coat pockets to find the sketch Tsukimi had made of their 60-year-old school Dean, made for Jiji's 19th birthday.

"Those jelly fish always looked so real," Mayaya agreed, demonstrating with great sweeping gestures just how real she thought they were, and how she would have dealt with the beasts if they had, in fact, invaded the dorm.

"And you won't draw attention to yourself," Banaba explained monotonously. "A weak personality will usually cancel itself out. So don't worry – technically, you won't even be there."

Well. How could her dull, weak personality resist such a challenge?

She steeled herself (with less steel, and more self-promises of green tea rolls for dessert as a reward), tilted her chin up (tried to find a baggy jumper that boasted the exact same pattern as Mrs Cheiko's wallpaper in her 'studio'), and fixed herself to look smart (apologised profusely to her mother as she attempted a last-minute abandon mission by calling in sick, which was received by the elusive dorm leader with a humourless 'heh').

Finally, when her reasons for stalling were rapidly drying out, and she'd shaved the last pencil – for the fourth time – to pointed-tip perfection, she hauled the essentials over her shoulder, locked her room, and began her arduous pilgrimage to the room directly above her own.

-x-x-x-

Chieko's mother could have been Chieko, only with laugh lines and a few ripples above her eyebrows.

So it was a little disconcerting to cast a quick glance at the woman, and think that it was Chieko sitting there, drawing a rough sketch of a high school boy and grown man making out against a wall.

_So this is what she's been hiding._

Blushing profusely, and refusing to meet the eyes of any animate/inanimate beings in the room, Tsukimi scurried over to an uncomfortable metal chair shoved into the corner, whilst praying for some form of divine intervention from this unlikely fiasco.

_I am invisible_, she meditated to herself, copying the creepy old psychic women she sometimes saw on late night television, _I am unnoticed. I am a jell-_

"Hey, you."

So much for that.

_Certain aquatic species fake death to escape higher predators_, a David Attenborough-like voice drifted into her conscience, supplying snippets of useless information a little too eagerly. _They show no sign of life, ignoring all around them. They become like the minute plasma swarming unnoticed by the predators gaze, casting off all-_

"Oh god," the voice persisted, then was cast into the opposite direction, "Is she breathing?"

"She's breathing," assured Mrs Chieko.

"'Cause she doesn't seem like she's breathing over there," the voice carried on, almost amiably. A chair clattered from somewhere in the centre of the studio, and the sound of footsteps grew closer. Tsukimi squeezed her eyes shut tight.

A beat passed. Then a scandalised splutter from Mrs Chieko. "Did you just _nudge_ her?"

_Yeah_, Tsukimi confirmed in her head, complemented by a mental grimace. _He just nudged me._

"Hey."

The quiet voice came from directly in front of her face in an uncomfortably warm blur, and she hesitantly cracked an eye.

"There you are. Now, the other."

She cracked her left eye now, and the hazy image of two boys became a clear-cut image of just one. A slim, lovely face with pale features and large eyes. A mischievous upward bend of the nose.

Two things registered at once.

"You look just like a girl," she blurted.

(The first.)

A still moment passed, but apparently she wasn't done quite yet.

"But you're a boy."

(The second.)

Then – somewhere, somehow – in the haze of her astronomical discoveries, a third thought jumped up and down in the back of the class with its hand swinging wildly in the air. _Pick me! Pick me! Pick me!_

Tsukimi magnanimously complied.

And so the third thought reared its ugly head, and she realised with a start that this boy that looked like a pretty girl, even though he was most certainly a boy, was squatting five centimetres from her face, a concentrated look in his eyes and a determined scowl to his mouth as he held her two wrists tight against her knees, like two warm (horribly, terribly, _criminally _warm) constraints. And also, she somehow brilliantly deduced that the boy – definitely, _definitely_ a boy – was sans shirt.

_Shirt. Gone. Bare. Boy. Skin. Muscles. Skin. Boy. Shirt. Bye Bye. Skin. Pale. Geh._

She tried to handle it like her cousin, Misao, would. She really, really did try. Her cousin Misao would have giggled and slapped him away or frowned or told him off or laughed or whispered or sighed or struggled or snorted or acted coy or punched or kissed the living daylights out of him. But she wasn't her cousin Misao – would never be her cousin Misao with her eight simultaneous boyfriends – and did what was purely, unadulterated, one hundred per cent Tsukimi.

"_EEE_-"

A hand slapped over her mouth, smothering the beginnings of one hell of a yelp. It didn't, however, stop the yelp from continuing its progress from behind his palm. A muffled, pathetic kind of yelp – granted – but a yelp, nonetheless.

"_-eee-"_

"You will listen to me," he instructed firmly, talking over her muffled cries, "and you will calm yourself."

The yelping died down into a sulky '_hmm_' that inadvertently kissed his palm, and Kuranosuke supressed a shiver.

_He definitely needed more women in his life_.

The lecture resumed, and Tsukimi had no choice to play dormant pupil while Kuranosuke did his best impression of his grade four mathematics teacher.

"My name is Kuranosuke. I am not gay, I am not queer, I am not curious about the other side of the fence, I have never in my past dabbled in bi-sexual impulses, and I have no homosexual tendencies in any way. I like women. Do you understand me?"

Tsukimi managed to answer this proclamation with a nod, brushing against the ticklish spot at the juncture of his pinkie and palm.

Kuranosuke decided this had to stop.

"Will you make a fuss if I remove my hand?"

An emphatic shake of the head.

"I don't believe you. It's staying."

_He'd call Cara as soon as he got home tonight._

"Kuranosuke, stop torturing the poor thing." This from Mrs Chieko, barely putting in the effort to sound reproving.

_More like self-torture,_ he sassed.

"Needs to be done," he threw back at her, then directed his attention back to the plain, bespectacled girl before him. "This does not mean, however, that I will jump you. I repeat; I will not jump you. I will not do any pose, face, posture, or suggestion that would make a virgin – like yourself – uncomfortable. I'm here for proportions, nothing else-"

"_Much_," Mrs Chieko muttered.

"-so I would appreciate it if you take your assignment seriously and draw me without having to throw yourself out of the window every five seconds. Are we clear?"

Tsukimi pushed his hand away. "I _wasn't_ going to jump out of the window-" she began huffily.

"_Are we clear?_"

For a moment, Tsukimi could have sworn she heard her grade four maths teacher emerge from beneath that blonde hair.

"…Yeah."

"Excellent."

They eyed each other warily.

"…You're not going to take your pants off too, are you?" She grimaced.

"No," Kuranosuke emphatically answered.

"_Yes_," Mrs Chieko emphatically answered.

-x-x-x-

As it happens, he stuck true to his word, and Kuranosuke kept his pants on (much to Tsukimi's immeasurable relief, and Mrs Chieko's palatable disappointment).

What Tsukimi didn't expect, though, was how much she enjoyed sketching him. He had an elegant form, one that faintly reminded her of her mother's (only without the obvious girly bits, and with the addition of obvious boy bits). She remembered last year, when she was forced to endure two-hour life drawing sessions where the male model (a hulking mass of muscle not unlike that of a rhinoceros) would parade around on a make-shift altar, flexing and bending and being overall gag-worthy. She spent half of last year with her head under the constant bubble of the drinking fountain, trying to cleanse her eyes of the evil they had seen.

But Kuranosuke was unlike any model she'd ever been forced to see.

Kuranosuke was beautiful, and it kind of broke her heart.

After about ten minutes into their session she'd been drawn into the familiar lull of quiet breathing and pencils scratching gently against paper. She was pleased Kuranosuke was staying still, relaxed in his chair a good five metres away from her; she was pleased Mrs Chieko was absorbed in whatever fantasy her mind was construing, glancing up at the blonde every now and again with a strange glint in her eyes; and she was pleased that her work looked good, though she couldn't decide whether it was her skill or her model that made every sheet look appealing.

After fifteen minute, Kuranosuke called break, and got up to give himself the biggest muscle-pulling stretch that mankind has probably ever seen.

The glint in Mrs Chieko's eyes sharpened, and she returned to her papers in a flurry.

"So," he drawled lazily, somehow seemingly exhausted from sitting in a comfortable chair for fifteen minutes, "are you going to let me see them?"

Somehow she assumed he meant her sketches, and not Mrs Chieko's tangible visions of his look-alike groping a thirty-year-old male office worker behind the water cooler.

She shrugged, blinked, then held out a sheet that had fluttered to the floor by her foot.

"Don't smudge it," she warned.

Kuranosuke tried to hide his surprise that a pipsqueak of a girl would try to warn him against doing _anything_.

"I won't," he promised.

But he kind of did, right where his elbow rested against his knee, so he tilted the drawing closer to his side of the room so she wouldn't see the blunder.

It was strange looking at himself. On closer inspection, though, he was surprised to find that that it wasn't an exact likeness. The drawing's nose was softer, somehow. And the arms weren't quite as sinewy as his own were. There was a heaviness to his eyes that he's never seen in the mirror.

He turned to the perpetrator, careful to cover the part of the drawing he messed up with his thumb.

"Who is this?" He demanded.

She regarded him with something that was a little too close to humour for his liking, and answered dubiously, "It's you."

She didn't even bother making it sound like a question.

He pushed the drawing closer to her face and demanded again, "Who is this?"

Craning forward, a sweep of chagrin crossed her face before it settled back into passive-aggressive warfare. That kind of annoying see-if-I-give-a-crap face all artists get when their work is being brought into question. She adjusted her glasses snobbishly.

He supposed that was answer enough.

"I like it," he admitted. "I mean, I look like a chick, but I like it."

"But you _do_ look like a chick," she grumbled, peeved.

He took a threatening step closer.

"_Ididn'tmeanitIsweardon'tcomeanycloser!_"

And just like that, the illusion was shattered, and she returned to a plain, bespectacled nerdy _girlthing_ overly concerned with personal space. _Huh_.

"Break time over," Chieko called, practically giddy with the progress she'd made.

He resumed to his fate with The Chair.

**-x-x-x-**

**A/N: Next part up soon ;)**

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